There has been a rapid increase in microfluidics-based Point-of-Care (PoC) devices, with potential as miniaturized laboratory platforms. Microfluidic devices typically have one or several microchannels. By including electrodes in microchannels, it is possible to apply electrical fields in a volume element of a liquid. This enables electrochemical detection of analytes, electroosmotic flow, dielectrophoresis (DEP) of particles or cells in microchannels, electrophoretic separation of particles and molecules, local heating, electrochemiluminescence, etc.
DEP is particularly interesting because it can generate a force by polarizing a suspended dielectric particle within a non-homogeneous electric field. Particle or cell manipulation via DEP therefore requires creating an electric field gradient, which is commonly done using planar metallic electrodes integrated or in close proximity to the microfluidic channel. Such electrode arrays are typically powered by applying alternating (AC) electric fields in the range of dozens of kHz up to hundreds of MHz. For this, the microfluidic device also needs to have two or more contact areas for powering the electrodes using a wave generator.
Fluorescence-based assays are widely used for detecting analytes. Fluorescence markers require optical detection with very sharp filters for the efficient separation between excitation light and fluorescent emission (usually, the fluorescence dyes have relatively small Stokes shift, of about 50 nm).
There are two known solutions:                1) Fluorescence microscopes+electronic laboratory bench signal generator: Very expensive and bulky setup equipment, not suitable for low cost point-of-care (PoC) applications (>$50 k) and also demands a laboratory infrastructure, but provides a high quality fluorescence analysis, using high quality light source, high quality filters and beam splitters, and can be equipped with very high sensitivity and low noise cameras with Peltier cooling, which obtains super high resolution fluorescence images and videos.        2) Lower cost and portable optical measurement devices or readers with miniaturized fluorescence optical detection system (LED illumination, focusing lens, dichroic mirror and photodetector), but these solutions are appropriate only for cellulose or paper strips (i.e. lateral low assays) and do not have embedded signal generators for DEP signal generation. Although cheaper than a Fluorescence Microscope, will still cost several thousands of dollars (typically $8K-10K).        